All of Vladimir Putin’s power rests on a myth that has permeated Russian society for the past two decades: the president put an end to the violence that ravaged the country in the 1990s. The attack, carried out in a cafe in St. Petersburg on Sunday, as well as …
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All of Vladimir Putin’s power rests on a myth that has permeated Russian society for the past two decades: the president put an end to the violence that ravaged the country in the 1990s. Sunday’s attack in a café in St. Petersburg, as well as the car bomb that killed the daughter of one of the leading intellectuals of Russian ultranationalism last August, has brought back memories of those nightmare years among the population. especially among the elite.
The war is being fought on Ukrainian soil, but there is a feeling that no one is out of danger. Neither has the Russian opposition, which the Kremlin has linked to Sunday’s terrorist attack with no indication other than sympathy for opposition leader Alexei Navalni’s views on the attack’s prime suspect.
A bomb killed militant and pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarski on Sunday afternoon in a busy cafeteria in Saint Petersburg where the fatal victim was attending a colloquium. Another thirty people were injured. Hours later, several people approached the police line to say goodbye to the activist, whose channel with more than half a million followers called for the war to continue. Putin awarded him the postmortem medal for bravery this Monday.
One of them, a young woman who wished to remain anonymous, reminded EL PAÍS of a phrase she had been repeating to her friends over the months: “On February 24, you thought Saint Petersburg was very far (from the front) and it wouldn’t affect us either (the invasion), but I told you: it will affect us all in one way or another.
For this woman, the red line was the murder on the outskirts of Moscow of Daria Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, the chief philosopher of the Kremlin’s most ultra-patriotic circle and, to some extent, influential in the notion that Russia should be at war with… the western world. “And Carthage must be destroyed,” is the motto copied by Dugin from Cato the Elder on his Geopolitika website, where Moscow is the third Rome and the west is Carthage.
The planting of a bomb in Dugina’s car in the heart of Russia, on the outskirts of Moscow, and the subsequent successful escape of the suspects first unnerved the Russian elite, who until then believed themselves safe from their enemies.
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“We have seen that the Ukrainian special services and their superiors can conduct operations (in Russia). This is shown by the terrorist attacks in which Daria Dugina and Maxim Fomin (real name Tatarsky) were killed,” emphasized another very popular war correspondent in Russia, Alexander Kots, in the program of one of the heads of Russian propaganda Vladimir Solovyov this Monday. “Ukraine acts aggressively and professionally on the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said, before stressing that the threat emanates not only from Ukrainian saboteurs, but also from critics inside Russia.
This last point was also emphasized on Monday by the head of the Wagner mercenary company, Yevgueni Prigozhin, who also posed in military clothes with a Russian tricolor on which was written “eternal memory of Vladlén Tatarski”. The businessman responded to the rain of questions about the attacked cafe with a statement, since Prigozhin is also the owner of the place where the ultranationalist talks took place.
“Yes, everything is similar to the death of Daria Dugina, but I would not blame the Kiev regime for these actions. I think there’s a group of radicals that doesn’t have much to do with their government,” said the Wagner owner.
Ironically, this Monday, the channel Shot not only published for the first time several images of the arrest of the alleged perpetrator of the crime, but also assured its sources that a former member of the National Bolshevik Party may have been involved in the attack, carried out by Dugin itself founded in the 1990s together with the writer Eduard Limónov and was later banned by the Kremlin because of its radicalism.
This newspaper claimed that Roman Popkov, a former party leader in Moscow and later a journalist in exile in Kiev, had handed over the suspect’s statuette laden with explosives and led her to believe that it was just a wiretapping system. “That’s a lie,” the defendant told The Insider newspaper. Popkov admits that the two have known each other since she wrote to him on social networks for his work at the beginning of the war, but he would never “perform such an operation.” “Do you think I would do that with my family in Russia?” he warned after declaring that “there are enough groups (within Russia) that would carry out such attacks”.
The Kremlin is looking for the enemy in Russia
Trépova (Saint Petersburg, 1997) was arrested this Monday at a friend’s apartment in Saint Petersburg. His participation in protests against the war in Ukraine last February spurred Russia’s ruling party to link the attack on the political opposition to the attack.
The National Counter-Terrorism Committee confirmed that the attack “was perpetrated by the special services of Ukraine, with the participation of persons collaborating with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK)”, the organization of Russian dissident Alexei Navalni, which is run by the was labeled as extremist authorities. The Russian investigative committee hammered in the same message, noting that Trepova “holds opposition views and is a supporter of the FBK.”
The opposition platform rejected this accusation. “An organization involved in political assassinations in Russia is not the FBK, but the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service),” wrote Navalni’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov on his Twitter account. “Questions remain unanswered: in the center of St. Petersburg, in the 24th year of (Putin) stability, a key propagandist is being brazenly killed in broad daylight. In one way or another, the supposedly all-powerful special services are responsible for this,” added Volkov, who saw the allegation against his platform as a way to evade the obligations of the security forces.
In her observations on the attack, political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the analysis center R.Politik, emphasized that the charges brought against Navalni only aim to criminalize all voices opposing the invasion of Ukraine. “Now everyone who engages in anti-war actions automatically becomes a potential terrorist, not only in the eyes of the security forces, but also in the eyes of the patriotic public. This, of course, will exacerbate social divisions,” Stanovaya affirms, before emphasizing that what happened “demonstrates how vulnerable the active defenders of the war are today.”
This opinion is shared by the Russian elite. “This terrorist attack is one more reason for us to think about our own safety hundreds of kilometers away from the front lines. The war is reaching everyone everywhere, ”deputy Andrei Guruliov, general and member of the State Duma Defense Committee, warned on Telegram.
Another well-known war correspondent, Alexander Sladkov, criticized that the investigations were being conducted by the police and not by the spy services. “I don’t think the quality of the police officers is inferior to that of the Cheka (the Soviet repressive agency), but this is a very important terrorism case. Why isn’t the FSB in the spotlight?” wondered the blogger. “We are losing ideological fighters,” Sladkov added in a post comparing this underground struggle with Kiev to a chess game “with White (Russia) running out of pawns and bishops.”
Some members of the Kremlin circle also cried out for revenge. “There will be no sympathetic jurors or jurors of any kind this time. And thank God,” said Margarita Simonián, head of the Russia Today channel, drawing a parallel between this attack and that suffered by the repressive General Trépov in 1878, the author of which was released and some passages from “The Karamazov brothers ” by Fyodor inspired Dostoyevsky. “The idiot writes about feminism and posts her half-naked photos in semi-pornographic poses. The feminism we deserve. The idiots we raised,” added Simonián in an attack on another demon of the Kremlin, the Feminism outside of conservatism, with several photos of the inmate appearing dressed.
With the assassination of Tatarsky, the Kremlin reiterated its call to support the war against Ukraine. “Russia opposes the Kiev regime. He supports terrorism; He is behind the murder of Dugina and possibly the murder of Fomin. He has been behind the murders of people for years,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
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